Arrival From Sweden

Fun fact

ABBA tribute-band founder Vicky Zetterberg does not listen to ABBA’s famously (even disturbingly) catchy music during her time off. Two of her iPod bands of choice: Deep Purple and Black Sabbath.

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Over the phone, the voice of Vicky Zetterberg sounds exactly how you’d expect it to, with a Swedish accent and a happy bounce that comes from years of singing in the world’s most successful ABBA tribute band.

She founded Arrival From Sweden in 1995 and has been touring the world ever since.

“I love it. I love to be in America,” she said a few days ago from sunny Palm Springs, Calif., one of the stops before the tour hits Ames on Wednesday.

She loves everything about ABBA, too. She was just 10 when she first saw them perform, at a park in Gothenburg.

“When you’re a kid, it’s amazing to see your idols in person,” she said. “It was really, really great to see them perform.”

But it was not really, really great to see an Australian tribute band in the early ’90s. In fact, “it was really, really bad. They spoke fake Swedish.”

Zetterberg figured she could do better, so she rounded up a band of her own. She sings the part of “Anni-Frid” and Jeanette Norlander is “Agnetha” (both on lead vocals), while Fredik Bjorns is “Bjorn” (guitar and vocals) and Leif Olsson is “Benny” (keyboard). The group tours with several of ABBA’s original bandmates, wearing gold catsuits and kimonos re-created by ABBA’s original costume designer.

ABBA’s name, by the way, comes from the first initial of each of its four stars. The tribute group’s name comes from ABBA’s fourth and best-selling album. The group flips the first “R” in “Arrival” backward, like ABBA did with the first “B.”

It’s one of many details that help re-create the look and sound of the original band, which performed from 1971 to 1982 and rocketed to worldwide fame on the “American Idol”-style Eurovision contest in 1974. The disco-glam band was a hit machine, cranking out one chart topper after the next: “Dancing Queen,” “Take a Chance” and “Mamma Mia,” which spawned the freakishly popular musical of the same name.

But ABBA rarely toured. The four lead singers — two married couples — had kids at home and couldn’t travel as much as their fans wanted. They toured the United States only once, in 1979. (One of the couples divorced that same year; the other, two years later.)

The tribute band has fared better. Members once played for 50,000 in Poland. They played for 35,000 in Madison, Wis., and sold out Denver’s 10,000-seat Red Rocks Amphitheatre multiple times over the past six years.

Most of their fans know the songs by heart. They’re less familiar with original band members.

“We tell the whole story — how they met, how they started the group,” Zetterberg said.

“You know everything about Elvis and everything about the Beatles, but a lot of people don’t know the people behind ABBA.”

Will more discover all that when Arrival arrives in Ames? Abbasolutely.